The Pink Floyd concert Nick Mason considered “one of our best”
For any good rock band, the show is as important as anything in the studio. After months on end of slaving away trying to get the right take, this is where all the hard work pays off and you’re finally ready to deliver songs to the people. While a band like Pink Floyd have seen their live show go through more than a few painful changes over their career, Nick Mason still thinks one of their best achievements was playing at Live 8.
Despite being one of the most celebrated rock bands of all time, it’s strange how shockingly little the band had to do once they hit the stage. They may have grown up in the era that gave the world Flower Power in the 1960s, but by the time they hit their stride as a prog band, they went absolutely insane with the visuals.
Gone were the surreal images of Syd Barrett. It was now time for the bright lights that felt like you were in a kaleidoscope, which has become practically the standard for what people think of when they talk about arena shows. The height of that kind of movement was The Wall, but it turned out David Gilmour had better things to do than make sure Roger Waters’s theatre piece went off without a hitch.
By the end of the tour, Waters considered himself the brains behind every piece of Pink Floyd, and after The Final Cut, it seemed that no one agreed, leading to Gilmour taking the rest to see out the rest of their recorded output. They still had the giant screens and the bright lights, but it was hard not to see something missing when playing songs like ‘Comfortably Numb’.
Which made it all the sweeter when they finally came back. Since a band like Pink Floyd seemed perfect to close out a show like Live Aid, no one was exactly looking to kiss and make up so soon after the last time. If it meant making the world a better place decades after the fact, though, then why the hell not?
For Mason, seeing Gilmour and Waters playing together again was everything the band was about, later telling eonmusic, “I always said that I think in some ways it was one of the best gigs we ever did, just because everyone knew about the fact that there was a sort of war going on [between Roger Waters and David Gilmour], and yet everyone was able to go, ‘do you know what, this is more important than differences of opinion, the band, or music, or whatever’”.
While the band would return to their regularly scheduled bickering for the rest of their career, the entire show almost didn’t go off without a hitch. If you check back at the rehearsal footage, you can tell that wounds haven’t fully healed between Gilmour and Waters, featuring a hilarious moment where Mason seems to chuckle when they start fighting, as if he’s some marriage counsellor watching them air their problems.
Still, it’s amazing looking back at the footage, especially with Richard Wright in the band and providing his signature keyboard parts to songs like ‘Wish You Were Here’. It may have been fun while it lasted, but it was probably best to enjoy it in the moment. Because given how well the pair’s relationship is now, you’re probably not going to see Gilmour and Waters onstage any time soon.
